06/17/2017

The Minnesota police officer who fatally shot Philando Castile during a traffic stop was acquitted on all charges by a jury Friday, a decision that came nearly a year after the encounter was partially streamed online to a rapt nation in the midst of a painful reckoning over shootings by law enforcement.

Officer Jeronimo Yanez pulled Castile’s car over in Falcon Heights, a suburb near Minneapolis and St. Paul, and the officer later said he thought Castile matched the description of a suspect in a robbery. The stop quickly escalated.

Yanez fired into the car, saying later he thought Castile was going for his gun, a claim Castile’s girlfriend, sitting in the seat next to him, disputed. She began streaming the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook Live.…During the trial, jurors heard testimony from dozens of witnesses, including Yanez, who cried on the stand while saying he did not want to shoot Castile. Yanez testified that he thought his life was in danger at the time, and attorneys for Yanez have argued that Castile caused his own death because of his actions during the traffic stop.…Yanez approached the car window and asked Castile for his license and proof of insurance, which the driver handed over, the complaint states. Castile also told Yanez he had a firearm on him, and seconds later, the officer told the driver not to pull out the gun. Castile said he was not taking out the gun, which Reynolds echoed. Yanez screamed, “Don’t pull it out” and pulled his own gun out, firing seven shots at Castile, the complaint states.…

When Yanez spoke to state investigators a day after the shooting, he told them he was “in fear for my life and my partner’s life.” Yanez told them that he thought Castile was reaching for the gun.

“I thought I was gonna die,” he told investigators, according to the complaint.

When evaluating the reasonableness of a police officer's use of deadly force, we must take into account that police officers are often required to react quickly—in tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving situations. To justify the use of deadly force, it is not enough, however, for the police officer to merely express a subjective fear of death or great bodily harm. Unreasonable fear cannot justify the use of deadly force. The use of deadly force must be objectively reasonable and necessary, given the totality of the circumstances.Based upon our thorough and exhaustive review of the facts of this case, it is my conclusion that the use of deadly force by Officer Yanez was not justified and that sufficient facts exist to prove this to be true. Accordingly, we filed a criminal complaint this morning in Ramsey County District Court charging Officer Yanez with Second Degree Manslaughter in the death of Philando Castile and two felony counts of Dangerous Discharge of a Firearm that endangered the safety of Diamond Reynolds and her four-year-old daughter, the two passengers in the car.

I fear that the jury’s findings only corroborate that the American people do not mind that their police frequently act lawlessly. Moreover, I fear that the American people do not mind, even more, that their police frequently act even more lawlessly to the black community in their nation.

Tom Kelly, who represented Mr. Yanez in court, has defended the killing, arguing: “This incident had nothing to do with race. It had everything to do with the presence of a gun. Race did not play a part in the use of deadly force at all. It was the presence of a gun.”

However, the presence of a gun alone should not be considered a just reason for violence, for if it were the police would have a just reason for shooting at a large fraction of the Americans they interact with. In Washington DC v. Heller, the Supreme Court has upheld that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms entirely unconnected with service in a militia. As a result of the Second Amendment, American police must frequently interact with people who lawfully carry firearms.

If Attorney Kelly is right that Mr. Yanez’s actions were just because there was a gun present, then no American who lawfully owns and carries a firearm would be safe interacting with the police. The law, which is supposed to guarantee domestic tranquility and the blessings of liberty among other things, would therefore no longer be doing anything of the sort. Law-abiding Americans would no longer be protected by their law and their interactions with the police are made just that more anarchic.

In this case, Mr. Yanez is ultimately more than a private citizen. Instead, he is an agent of the state and a member of the police-force in a nation in which the police have frequently chosen to defend their own interests above the general welfare. The shooting of a black man only puts these roles in greater clarity.

The problems are then much wider in scope than Mr. Yanez himself. These problems highlight that there is a structural problem with the police, including the heinous war on drugs, that have frankly given them the power to oppress the black community. Given Attorney Kelly’s defense of Mr. Yanez’s actions, blacks can no longer be confident that they even have Second-Amendment rights.

To me, the jury's decision is clear: The police have a license to kill in this country. That affects blacks much, much more than it does whites. For durable progress to be made on race in this nation, we, the people, need to rescind that license to kill. The police must be made accountable to those that they are said to serve, and right now, they have given American blacks every reason to believe their interests ultimately conflict.

What to do, you ask? The first thing that should be done is to immediately end the war on drugs, which disproportionately harms the black community and which has given the police so many opportunities to exercise unlawful power over the black community.

In recent months we’ve seen a number of cases where courts have excused police for shooting citizens even after the police made mistakes — and the citizens were doing nothing wrong — simply because these citizens were exercising their Second Amendment rights. This is unacceptable, and it represents the most extreme possible deprivation of civil rights and civil liberties.

I understand the inherent danger of police work. I also understand the legal responsibilities of men and women who volunteer to put on that uniform, and the legal rights of the citizens they’ve sworn to protect and serve. I’m aware of no evidence that Yanez panicked because Castile was black. But whether he panicked because of race, simply because of the gun, or because of both, he still panicked, and he should have been held accountable. The jury’s verdict was a miscarriage of justice.

06/06/2017

The difference between the right of owning a weapon and migrating to another society is that the latter is based on the natural impetus for self-preservation while the latter involves wanting to enter into a society that may have grown prosperous based on entirely different culture. The difference ultimately lies in distinctive notions of the bona vita, of the good life, that are not in play about discussions about the right to self-defense, which the right to bear arms is anchored on.

My moral point of view is idiosyncratic from a modern point of view, so I should explain myself a bit and I shall do so through the lens of two authors: Larry Arnhart and Hugo Grotius.

Mr. Arnhart provides a persuasive interpretation of natural right as being those conditions necessary to achieve human flourishing in human societies. As Mr. Arnhart points out in Darwinian Natural Right: “The moral opinions that drive political controversies are ultimate opinions about the best way of life for human beings, about how human beings must live to satisfy their natural desires” (p. 1). Natural rights are therefore those faculties that people tend to need, by virtue of the principles of human nature, to acquire a good life. Unlike the right to self-defense, whence philosophers and jurists have derived the right to own a firearm, the capability to migrate from one society to another is not an essential precondition for human flourishing across all cultural contexts and can therefore not be reasonable considered a right transcending all those cultural contexts.

Grotius then provides an understanding of rights as flowing from human sociability and from the fact that human beings are creatures who derive almost all their advantages from social intercourse. In The Rights of War and Peace, Grotius argues that all rights derive from sociability: “This Sociability… or this Care of maintaining Society in a manner conformable to the Light of human understanding, is the Fountain of Right, properly so called; to which belongs the Abstaining from that which is another’s, and the Restitution of what we have of another’s, or of the Profit we have made by it, the Obligation of fulfilling Promises, the Reparation of a Damage done through our own Default, and the Merit of Punishment among Men” (pp. 85-6). Here, Grotius properly identifies human rights largely with commutative justice and abuses of rights as the taking of what is properly another’s. He makes that connection again in The Rights of War and Peace when he writes that “Justice… consists wholly in abstaining from that which is another Man’s” (p.120). Unlike the case of denying ownership of firearms, denying a would-be immigrant access to a nation is not a violation of commutative justice, and so can reasonably be said to not be a violation of right.

Let me dwell more on these themes: The most basic of all conditions for human flourishing is self-preservation. A dead or gravely wounded animal cannot be a flourishing one, and so it is reasonable, by any animal’s very nature, that they tend towards actions that preserve themselves. Self-preservation takes a significant role in Grotius’ system of jurisprudence. He described it as being “that Instinct whereby every Animal seeks its own Preservation, and loves its Condition, and whatever tends to maintain it” (p. 180). In order to guarantee that people are free to pursue virtue and the good life, laws must principally guarantee self-preservation; hence, across history, it is seen as the utmost of tyranny for rulers to arbitrarily deny people their self-preservation by unlawfully killing or imprisoning them. Grotius also testifies to the right of self-preservation as being antecedent to all other rights: “’tis the first Duty of every one to preserve himself in his nature State” (Ibid).

It is impossible to entirely separate the gun-ownership from concerns of self-preservation: Firearms, especially handguns, are great equalizers. Even at a great physical and training disadvantage, one human beings can still pose a mortal threat to another human being. The right to bear arms emerges out of a right to protect one’s property. George Orwell’s article “Don't let Colonel Blimp ruin the Home Guard” is most celebrated by gun-lovers for his observation that “that rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy.” However, I think he makes an even more worthwhile observation in “You and the atomic bomb,” when he observed that firearms are an inherently democratic weapon that give power to the people, so to speak:

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, thanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon—so long as there is no answer to it—gives claws to the weak. The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle. After the invention of the flintlock, and before the invention of the percussion cap, the musket was a fairly efficient weapon, and at the same time so simple that it could be produced almost anywhere. Its combination of qualities made possible the success of the American and French revolutions, and made a popular insurrection a more serious business than it could be in our own day.

One may not agree with citizens having the right to own assault rifles or other military-grade firearms. Nevertheless, I think that it is unreasonable to argue that firearms have nothing to do with the impetus for self-preservation in society. After all, those who might not be able to fend of an attacker can have their minds put at ease by owning a pistol. Moreover, the right to own a pistol is essentially related to concerns of commutative justice: The question is whether a citizen can claim an object, in this case a firearm, as his own, and so the legal question is a question of right.

However one decides the issue of whether it is a right to bear arms, it is certainly a right that is directly related to the most animal, and therefore most fundamental, principle of human nature: The instinct for self-preservation.

This is not the case with immigration. While self-defense is natural to our animal nature, emigration derives from a desire to live in complex societies that have evolved through artificial means, including the civilizing process, and which take their character from the ideas of those that inhabit them. Nobody is migrating these days in order to go live in an otherwise uninhabited patch of land. Instead, immigrants are generally attracted to the opportunities that different societies can offer them. Those societies are organized entities that have, over generations, accumulated variations deriving from the ideas of those inhabitants. They are ultimately the products of human artifice and it is not unreasonable to assume that such artifice might include excluding outsiders. People’s desire to immigrate may be entirely natural and praiseworthy; however, that desire does not imply they can justly immigrate wherever they like because of the concern for preserving the ideas that have made a society so prosperous to begin with.

The reason is that it is entirely plausible for some people to think that any person’s pursuit of happiness might harm the general welfare of a society based on entirely different ideas. As Garett Jones has argued in “Do immigrants import their economic destinies?”: “Government policies don’t radiate from subterranean mineral deposits: they are in large part the product of its voting citizens. And in the long run, new citizens lead to new policies.” I would go even further and argue that the very customs, let alone government-policies, that make any society possible are the product of living citizens perpetuating the customs that previous citizens established. Edmund Burke eloquently expressed this idea when he wrote that society was a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are to be born.” Introducing new people with radically different ideas might lead to unintended consequences to that partnership that cannot be adequately foreseen and so policy-makers can be reasonable in a moderate desire to limit the introduction, via immigration, of ideas that might undermine that partnership.

A tragic aspect of the conversation about immigration is that so many people decide to leave their country because their own nations are no longer conducive to their own flourishing. However, I believe that most refugee-policy is a matter of beneficence, not justice.

After all, there is no violation of commutative justice that happens when one nation erects a wall against another, however unseemly that wall might be. No citizen of one nation can say that they own citizenship in another nation—and it needs to be emphasized ad nauseum that citizenship is an artificial construction of social evolution, not a universal impetus in human nature. Citizens in one nation can say, probably unreasonably in most situations but reasonably in some, to those wanting access to their own nation: Heal thy own nation. That is certainly a harsh statement, maybe unreasonably so from a beneficent point of view, but that is certainly not an unjust statement. After all, there is no violation of commutative justice going on, just a denial of access.

Ultimately, I think that the open-immigration debate terribly frames the practical question at hand by conjuring up a right and crying out: Justitia fiat, et pereat mundus! However, policy is never a binary; rather, it is a matter of decisions at the margins. Modern nations do not face the question of letting in everybody or nobody; instead, they let some people in and exclude others. The practical question is on the margins and deciding the marginal person who should be excluded. Should, say, Great Britain exclude known Wahhabists? I would say that it should. Should it exclude Christians, and for that matter many Muslims, fleeing persecution in Syria? I would say not.

Enshrining open immigration as a human right ex nihilo is a form of rational constructivism that we have reason to think might harm social order. Rather than treat the social partnerships we have inherited as carte blanche to remake in our own image, we should be happy, as the stewards of those partnerships, to improve policy at the margins.

BibliographyArnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.Grotius. Hugo. 2005. The Rights of War and Peace. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

06/03/2017

I had the pleasure of visiting the National Gallery of Art earlier this evening. As is to be expected, I was only able to make my way through a small fraction of the exhibits in the hour or so that I was there. The main exhibit I looked at was on French paintings that were exhibited at American museums during the 18th century and there was another exhibit on French expressionism, with plenty of Pissaro's urban paintings on display. Much to my enjoyment, there was an entire room dedicated to John Constable and J.M.W. Turner in their role as British landscape artists.

06/02/2017

In that article, Mr. Gaetan discusses the tension between how Pope Francis and President Donald Trump have entirely different views about the Wahhabist absolute monarchy that is Saudi Arabia. The Vatican condemns Saudi Arabia because it is a nation that persecutes Christianity domestically, has played a critical role in the wars in both Syria and Yemen, and, perhaps most fundamentally, is aligned with an intolerant branch of Sunni Islam, Wahhabism.

An excerpt from the article:

A key source of tension between the House of Saud and the Holy See is Saudi limits on Christian religious expression. Some 1.5 million Catholics currently reside in the Kingdom, most of them guest workers from the Philippines. They have no way to practice their faith. Mass is only available to Christian diplomats at a few foreign embassies and is off limits to foreign national laborers. (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI met with King Abdullah in 2007, inspiring discussion of opening a Catholic Church, but nothing came of it.) Non-Muslim signs of religious devotion, from rosaries to Bibles, are banned. Meanwhile, the Holy See has collaborated with governments in Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, where Christian populations—and tolerance of Christianity—have grown over the past ten years, to establish Catholic places of worship.

Second, Catholic experts on terrorism consider the official Saudi faith of Wahhabism, an eighteenth-century Salafi movement founded on the peninsula, to be a destabilizing source of extremism. For the Holy See, Wahhabism’s threat is existential: Wahhabi intolerance and money fuel violence against Christians and other communities across the Middle East and beyond. To counter this threat, the Vatican is cultivating relationships with non-Wahabbist Islamic cultural centers such as Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which Francis visited last month. Al-Azhar’s Grand Imam, Sheik Ahmad el-Tayeb, visited Francis in Rome last year, an especially significant development given that Tayeb led a boycott against the Vatican in 2011 after Benedict commented on anti-Christian violence in Egypt. Many hope that the renewed relationship will give new momentum to Christian–Muslim dialogue.

Wariness about Wahhabism also applies to Syria, where local Catholic leaders remain skeptical regarding a Saudi-backed regime change. It is a simple calculus: Christian communities, whether Orthodox or Catholic, have been protected by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad before that; Sunni extremism could bring Sharia law and second-class status for Christians. In the Church’s view, it does not bode well for Trump to plant himself so squarely in the Saudi camp.

Third, the Vatican has opposed Saudi Arabia’s particularly aggressive war in Yemen, a relatively tolerant country with some respect for religious freedom. The Vatican classifies Saudi Arabia’s bombing in Yemen as an archetypical “unjust war”—inessential to the country’s survival, launched without negotiating first, and ruthlessly devastating to non-combatants. In an air campaign highly dependent on U.S. support, Saudi Arabia has dropped cluster bombs and other devastating munitions on Yemeni civilian populations, including schools and medical clinics.

Another interesting aspect of the Vatican's relationship with the Muslim world that Mr. Gaetan highlights in the article is its cordial relationship with Shia Iran:

Analysts typically describe the Saudi–Yemeni conflict in terms of Sunni–Shia rivalry, with Saudi Arabia facing off against the Houthi rebels, mainly Zaydi Muslims, who, at least originally, had loose ties to Shia Iran. Although the Vatican has no link to the Houthi movement, it is generally sympathetic to Shia Islam, which has highly educated clerics organized hierarchically, a theology with Christian parallels, and a general respect for the Catholic Church and its faithful. The Vatican has developed a sympathetic relationship with Iran’s religious leadership and was highly supportive of the U.S.–Iranian nuclear deal. The modern diplomatic relationship between the two dates back to 1954, and was maintained throughout the Islamic Revolution. Iran’s embassy in Rome is one of the largest, most active missions to the Holy See, which sees Iran as key to solving the crisis in Syria.

Pope Francis and the Vatican are ultimately right. If the United States really wanted to advance peace in the Near East, it would pursue further détente with Iran and stop selling Saudia Arabia billions of dollars worth of weapons.

On a side note, the problems with American policy transcend the person of Donald Trump and his administration. For over a generation, the United States has portrayed Iran as the evil empire in this area of the world all while casting a blind eye of the House al-Saud's patronage of Wahhabist causes that preach jihad. Moreover, the problem isn't even particularly American. Even Justin Trudeau's administration in Canada has gone ahead with an, albeit much, much smaller, arms-deal with Saudi Arabia.